Diogenes the Cynic

Docetism is not mythicism. They thought Jesus was all spirit, but they thought he was a historical spirit.

aa5874

What nonsense!!! There is NO such thing as an historical Spirit. A Spirit is NOT a figure of history.


In the Quest for an Historical Jesus ONLY a human Jesus is considered historical.

You ought to know that Gods and Son of Gods are MYTH characters whether or NOT people believe they exist.

The Quest for an historical Jesus is NOT a question of belief of existence and it does NOT even matter if people believe Jesus was human because Myth characters can be described as human.

The Myth characters Romulus and Remus were human brothers born of the same woman and were the Founders of Rome--See Plutarch "Romulus".

There is NO evidence anywhere that a Spirit was human or a figure of history.

Soon you will claiming the Holy Ghost was a Figure of History.

Please, please, we are arguing History. If you have NO history for your Jesus then what is the point???

Iskander

Before the existence of a church doctrine Christians understood the nature of the founder as they saw fit.

One major group regarded Jesus as a man God had chosen, in whom God dwelt: adoption interpretation.


Another major group regarded Jesus as a heavenly being who became a man and returned to heaven when his work was done: spiritual interpretation.

Both of these interpretations start from the existence of the man Jesus, but differ as to how to proceed.

Solo

Hi Jay,
out of curiosity: what political witchhunt do you think she suffered ? Based on what ? Thanks.

Best,
Jiri

aa5874

You have ZERO credible evidence to support any claim of ACTUAL historical events about Jesus and the Church. You cannot argue HISTORY on assumptions and PRESUMPTIONS.

Jesus was described as the Son of a Ghost so we cannot ASSUME that he was a man.

Remarkably, in the Jesus stories it is corroborated in other sources that Pilate was a Governor, that Gabriel was considered an angel, that Caiaphas was an High Priest, that Satan was considered the Devil and God was considered the God of the Jews.

Well, the very same NT claimed Jesus was the Son of a Ghost so that MUST be PRECISELY how the author wanted to described the character.

If Gabriel was an angel why can't Jesus be the Son of a Ghost???

It is just a story.

Why can't people write Ghost stories in antiquity??

People TODAY BELIEVE GHOSTS are real and People BELIEVED 1800 years ago.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Jiri,

A couple of websites give some information that gives us reason to pause before accepting the legend of the bloodthirsty Countess.

According to Bathory:History, the Historian's View:

Countess Elizabeth Báthory tells us:

King Matthias of Hungary, a Catholic, owed a lot of money to Elizabeth Bathory, a Calvinist. At the same time Gabriel Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, and Erzsébet's nephew was being attacked by Gabriel Bethlen who was favored by the Ottoman Turks to be Prince of Transylvania. Bethlen is known to have spread stories of witchcraft against Gabriel Bathory, as well as other members of the Bathory family.

The History website notes:

At the trial, Elizabeth Bathory was not arrested and only her servants were put on trial. They were tortured into confessions. "Hearsay" (rumor) was accepted. We should remember that everybody knew the King was in debt to Bathory. Stories of the countess killing a few peasant girls would be dismissed in the public mind, as nobility generally used harsh punishments that often ended up in the death of a peasant now and again. The king really needed to prove sensational mass murder accusations for the trial to be seen as anything but a vendetta against an innocent woman of another faith whom the King was in deep debt to.

The King never did get around to putting Elizabeth on trial. Cancelling the debt, ruining her reputation, and getting her locked away in her castle for life was enough for him. She, of course, never got a chance to say a single word in her own defense.

Witnesses all disagreed about the number of people she had killed and tortured. One witness said that she kept a diary recording 615 deaths. The diary has never been found. This does not keep hundreds of websites from declaring that she kept a diary with the details of over 600 deaths recorded
in it, for example PoeForward European Dead Girls reports, "In fact, Elizabeth killed 612 women. She documented their deaths in her diary."

Again, as far as I can tell, the historical evidence that she was a sadistic mass murderess or that she was any kind of sadist or murderess at all, is lacking. Certainly, the same cannot be said for the people who put her on trial.

As the History website notes:
Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Solo

Thanks, Jay.
It is really interesting to see the how new political spins quickly generate new historical ones. Orwell had it right in saying that he who controls the present controls the past. And so it would be really surprising in this day and age if one of the most powerful women of her time in Hungary who was walled in a wing of her own castle without a trial did not find a feminist defender.

No she did not murder scores of women to satisfy her horrific depravity; she actually did not murder any of them. Women do not do that sort of thing. No, this was an intrigue of an old dick-friend of her husband's - the Palatine of Hungary (something like the king's prime minister and attorney general) who fabricated a tale of several dozen dead bodies and had four innocent people tortured and executed for the heinous crimes of Elizabeth to get his paws on her vast holdings. He didn't grab the properties after she starved herself to death in protest ? Hey, let's not allow facts get in a way of feminist Herstory. We know what dicks do; how they wanted to do a hatchet job even on Lizzie Borden, until Lucy Stone stopped them.

Of course I am lampooning here but the attempts to rehabilitate Elizabeth Bathory do have a starting date: in 1994, a historian member of the Slovak Academy, Ms. Tünde Lengyelová, Phd. wrote a monograph titled "Doubts About the Guilt of the Lady of Cachtice" which was published in a Slovak History Review. Nothing much happened until a lavish movie Bathory appeared in 2008 which esentially portrayed Elizabeth a la Tünde (she was the "historical" advisor onn the set) as a female genius, healer and inventor, and a victim of patriarchal intrigues. The movie (most expensive in Czech-Slovak history of cinema) quickly generated renewed interest and at least half a dozen titles appeared in the next two years after the movie n CR-Slovakia-Hungary with saturated publicity much resembling Da Vinci Code.

So, essentially, from my vantage point, this is an attempt to rewrite history to serve familiar propaganda, and distort not only what happened but the understanding of the of the social mosaic of the time. The two writers who are believable to me (Jozef Kocsis, Pavel Dvorak) give a benefit of the doubt to Juraj Thurzo who ordered the imprisonment. It was most likely motivated by his loyalty to her family (like himself Calvinist), and the name of the Magyar nobility. This was the time of the kingdom's struggle against the Turks, and Habsburg expansionist ambitions. The Habsburgs and the king Matthias II. of Hungary (who became the Emperor in 1612) were Catholic. The charge that there was not enough evidence to convict the countess of multiple homicide is rank nonsense. Some of her victims were members of her court, daughters of lesser nobility. There was a technical problem also: there was no precedent for trying a member of nobility on this type of crime. By tradition the only capital crime for a noble was treason. The fact remains that the family property was passed on to her sons. (There is a letter of Paul Nadaszdy, her son, from 1611, to Thurzo which confirms his and his siblings' possessions were transferred). This was not challenged by Tünde Lengyelová: she says Bathory herself transferred the property to her sons, which is of course a pericope in a feminist gospel.

So from wher I am sitting, the historical picture seems to be pretty close to certain: Bathory was a prolific killer, totally apart from the fact she was an exceptionally well-educated woman, speaking fluently several languages.

Best,
Jiri